Exhibit Review “PEOPLE AND COMPUTERS” AT THE COMPUTER MUSEUM JANET ABBATE Boston’s Computer Museum originated as a place where computer professionals could admire vintage machines and relive their indus try’s past. Since becoming a nonprofit educational organization and moving to its current downtown location, the museum has changed its orientation from glorifying artifacts to explaining how computers work and their impact on society. Each of its new exhibits addresses a different educational goal: “The Walk-Through Computer” explains how microcomputers work; “Tools and Toys” lets visitors try out computer applications; and “People and Computers: Milestones of a Revolution,” which opened in June 1991, highlights the history of computing. “People and Computers” leaves behind the days when the museum displayed machines like sacred objects in antiseptic surroundings. With the help of an academic advisory panel, curator Gregory Welch has adopted an ambitious historical approach stressing themes such as alternative technologies and social trade-offs. The organizing princi ple of the exhibit is a series of nine “milestones,” beginning with punch-card machines in the 1930s and moving through mainframes, minis, and micros to the 1990s. Each milestone features a historically important computer in a re-creation of its original environment, whether a Cray-1 in a British weather station or a DEC PDP-8 being used to light a Broadway show. Labels describe the way each machine was used and raise technical and social issues. The exhibit uses the interactive workstations that have become a hallmark of the Com puter Museum’s style to explain technical concepts and to solicit visitors’ opinions about computers. The design created by Ted Groves and Richard Fowler embodies both strengths and weaknesses of the milestone approach. Visitors Ms. Abbate is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. She is writing her dissertation on the history of computer networks.© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3403-0002$01.00 665 666 Janet Abbate Fig. 1.—The video archway at the entrance to the Computer Museum’s “People and Computers.” (Photo by Asa Chibas.) enter through an arch composed of eighteen video monitors on which historical and computer-related images flash by so quickly that one is left with little more than an impression of rapid change (fig. 1). Likewise, the milestone format trades continuity and breadth for depth and vividness. Each milestone is approached through a short passageway or “time tunnel” that surrounds the visitor with contem porary images and music; inside, a three-dimensional scene showcas ing a particular computer is surrounded by texts, artifacts, and videos that reveal popular and media responses to computers. The videos alone are worth a visit: eighty in all, they depict people who built and worked with—or were put out of work by—computers, contemporary concerns about the machines, and popular entertainments ranging from Metropolis to the Monkees. While the exhibit celebrates the increasing power and accessibility of the machines as they became smaller, cheaper, and easier to use, it also raises questions about adverse effects of computers such as depersonalization, technological unemployment, and threats to pri vacy. Labels point out the less glamorous aspects of using computers, describing how the UNIVAC 1, the first commercial computer, required months of programming and debugging before it was usable, and how users of the IBM System/360 could not access the “People and Computers” at the Computer Museum 667 Fig. 2.—Reconstruction of the World War 11-era Whirlwind control room. (Photo by Fay Photo.) machine directly but were obliged to hand punch cards to the machine’s operators and wait for a result. The exhibit also draws attention to techniques or products that were abandoned or failed commercially. For example, a case labeled “The Best Idea Doesn’t Always Win” displays artifacts whose design was not adopted and describes human factors, such as the reluctance to change established practices, that prevented their commercial success. “Aftermath of the War,” which features the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Whirlwind computer developed during World War II to help aim naval artillery, is an example of many things the exhibit does right. Visitors see the Whirlwind in its control room, complete with...